Model of ICT skills and new professional profile of the Guidance Counsellors in some European countries

El artículo analiza la utilización de las Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicación en el escenario de algunos países europeos en el ámbito de la Orientación Educativa y Profesional.

Developing Accessible Mobile Phone Applications: The Case of a Contact Manager and Real Time Text Applications

Mobile phones are becoming increasingly popular and are already the first access technology to information and communication. However, people with disabilities have to face a lot of barriers when using this kind of technology. This paper presents an Accessible Contact Manager and a Real Time Text application, designed to be used by all users with disabilities. Both applications are focused to improve accessibility of mobile phones.

Motivating Young Students to Start a Career in Nuclear: The Basic Course of Science and Nuclear Technology, An Educational Activity of Spanish Young Generation in Nuclear (JÓVENES NUCLEARES)

The main objective of this course, conducted by Jóvenes Nucleares (Spanish Young Generation in Nuclear, JJNN), a non-profit organization that depends on the Spanish Nuclear Society (SNE) is to pass on basic knowledge about Science and Nuclear Technology to the general public, mostly students and introduce them to its most relevant points. The purposes of this course are to provide general information, to answer the most common questions about Nuclear Energy and to motivate the young students to start a career in nuclear. Therefore, it is directed mainly to high school and university students, but also to general people that wants to learn about the key issues of such an important matter in our society. Anybody could attend the course, as no specific scientific education is required. The course is done at least once a year, during the Annual Meeting of the Spanish Nuclear Society, which takes place in a different Spanish city each time. The course is done also to whichever university or institution that asks for it to JJNN, with the only limit of the presenter´s availability. The course is divided into the following chapters: Physical nuclear and radiation principles, Nuclear power plants, Nuclear safety, Nuclear fuel, Radioactive waste, Decommission of nuclear facilities, Future nuclear power plants, Other uses of nuclear technology, Nuclear energy, climate change and sustainable development. The course is divided into 15 minutes lessons on the above topics, imparted by young professionals, experts in the field that belongs either to the Spanish Young Generation in Nuclear, either to companies and institutions related with nuclear energy. At the end of the course, a 200 pages book with the contents of the course is handed to every member of the audience. This book is also distributed in other course editions at high schools and universities in order to promote the scientific dissemination of the Nuclear Technology. As an extra motivation, JJNN delivers a course certificate to the assistants. At the end of the last edition course, in Santiago de Compostela, the assistants were asked to provide a feedback about it. Some really interesting lessons were learned, that will be very useful to improve next editions of the course. As a general conclusion of the courses it can be said that many of the students that have assisted to the course have increased their motivation in the nuclear field, and hopefully it will help the young talents to choose the nuclear field to develop their careers

An approach to stakeholders involvement in the preparedness for nuclear and radiological emergency response & recovery in Spain

The elaboration of a generic decision-making strategy to address the evolution of an emergency situation, from the stages of response to recovery, and including a planning stage, can facilitate timely, effective and consistent decision making by the response organisations at every level within the emergency management structure and between countries, helping to ensure optimal protection of health, environment, and society. The degree of involvement of stakeholders in this process is a key strategic element for strengthening the local preparedness and response and can help a successful countermeasures strategy. A significant progress was made with the multi-national European project EURANOS (2004-2009) which brought together best practice, knowledge and technology to enhance the preparedness for Europe's response to any radiation emergency and long term contamination. The subsequent establishment of a European Technology Platform and the recent launch of the research project NERIS-TP ("Towards a self sustaining European Technology Platform (NERIS-TP) on Preparedness for Nuclear and Radiological Emergency Response and Recovery") are aimed to continue with the remaining tasks for gaining appropriate levels of emergency preparedness at local level in most European countries. One of the objectives of the NERIS-TP project is: Strengthen the preparedness at the local/national level by setting up dedicated fora and developing new tools or adapting the tools developed within the EURANOS projects (such as the governance framework for preparedness, the handbooks on countermeasures, the RODOS system, and the MOIRA DSS for long term contamination in catchments) to meet the needs of local communities. CIEMAT and UPM in close interaction with the Nuclear Safety Council will explore, within this project, the use and application in Spain of such technical tools, including other national tools and information and communication strategies to foster cooperation between local, national and international stakeholders. The aim is identify and involve relevant stakeholders in emergency preparedness to improve the development and implementation of appropriate protection strategies as part of the consequence management and the transition to recovery. In this paper, an overview of the "state of the art" on this area in Spain and the methodology and work Plan proposed by the Spanish group within the project NERIS to grow the stakeholder involvement in the preparedness to emergency response and recovery is presented.

Distributes award protocol: A cooperation and communication method for robots.

In this Master’s Thesis a new Distributed Award Protocol (DAP) for robot communication and cooperation is presented. Task assignment (contract awarding) is done dynamically with contracts assigned to robots based upon the best bid received. Instead of having a manager and a contractor it is proposed a fully distributed bidding/awarding mechanism without a distinguished master. The best bidding robots are awarded with contract for execution. The contractors make decisions locally. This brings the following benefits: no communication bottleneck, low computational power requirement, increased robustness. DAP can handle multitasking. Tasks can be injected into system during the execution of already allocated tasks. As tasks have priorities, in the next cycle after taking into account actual bid parameters of all robots, tasks can be re-allocated. The aim is to minimize a global cost function which is a compromise between cost of task execution and cost of resources usage. Information about tasks and bid values is spread among robots with the use of a Round Robin Route, which is a novel solution proposed in this work. This method allows also identifying failed robots. Such failed robot is eliminated from the list of awarded robots and its replacement is found so the task is still executed by a team. If the failure of a robot was temporary (e.g. communication noise) and the robot can recover, it can again participate in the next bidding/awarding process. Using a bidding/awarding mechanism allows robots to dynamically relocate among tasks. This is also contributes to system robustness. DAP was evaluated through multiple experiments done in the multi-robot simulation system. Various scenarios were tested to check the idea of the main algorithm. Different failures of robots (communication failures, partial hardware malfunctions) were simulated and observations were made regarding how DAP recovers from them. Also the DAP flexibility to environment changes was watched. The experiments in the simulated environment confirmed the above features of DAP.

PREDIRCAM eHealth platform for individualized telemedical assistance for lifestyle modification in the treatment of obesity, diabetes, and cardiometabolic risk prevention: a pilot study (PREDIRCAM 1)

Background: Healthy diet and regular physical activity are powerful tools in reducing diabetes and cardiometabolic risk. Various international scientific and health organizations have advocated the use of new technologies to solve these problems. The PREDIRCAM project explores the contribution that a technological system could offer for the continuous monitoring of lifestyle habits and individualized treatment of obesity as well as cardiometabolic risk prevention. Methods: PREDIRCAM is a technological platform for patients and professionals designed to improve the effectiveness of lifestyle behavior modifications through the intensive use of the latest information and communication technologies. The platform consists of a web-based application providing communication interface with monitoring devices of physiological variables, application for monitoring dietary intake, ad hoc electronic medical records, different communication channels, and an intelligent notification system. A 2-week feasibility study was conducted in 15 volunteers to assess the viability of the platform. Results: The website received 244 visits (average time/session: 17 min 45 s). A total of 435 dietary intakes were recorded (average time for each intake registration, 4 min 42 s ± 2 min 30 s), 59 exercises were recorded in 20 heart rate monitor downloads, 43 topics were discussed through a forum, and 11 of the 15 volunteers expressed a favorable opinion toward the platform. Food intake recording was reported as the most laborious task. Ten of the volunteers considered long-term use of the platform to be feasible. Conclusions: The PREDIRCAM platform is technically ready for clinical evaluation. Training is required to use the platform and, in particular, for registration of dietary food intake.

The online case study development for the teaching of building structures reinforcement

The Reinforcement of Building Structures is one of the topics of the Master in Building Innovation Technology (MBIT) of Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). Since the beginning of the delivery of this master, case studies have been chosen as the teaching methodology. For the 2011-2012 course the online education of this subject was implemented, instead of the classical learning based on attendance. Through ICT’s (Information and Communication Technologies) students are provided with much more and more selective information than through the classical learning. ICT’s can be used for search, enquiries and reporting. Using the online tools has been proved, through the results obtained and based on the surveys made amongst students, to be a successful experience.

The educational learning lifecycle and the cloud computing

Currently, student dropout rates are a matter of concern among universities. Many research studies, aimed at discovering the causes, have been carried out. However, few solutions, that could serve all students and related problems, have been proposed so far. One such problem is caused by the lack of the "knowledge chain educational links" that occurs when students move onto higher studies without mastering their basic studies. Most regulated studies imparted at universities are designed so that some basic subjects serve as support for other, more complicated, subjects, thus forming a complicated knowledge network. When a link in this chain fails, student frustration occurs as it prevents him from fully understanding the following educational links. In this proposal we try to mitigate these disasters that stem, for the most part, the student?s frustration beyond his college stay. On one hand, we make a dissertation on the student?s learning process, which we divide into a series of phases that amount to what we call the "learning lifecycle." Also, we analyze at what stage the action by the stakeholders involved in this scenario: teachers and students; is most important. On the other hand, we consider that Information and Communication Technologies ICT, such as Cloud Computing, can help develop new ways, allowing for the teaching of higher education, while easing and facilitating the student?s learning process. But, methods and processes need to be defined as to direct the use of such technologies; in the teaching process in general, and within higher education in particular; in order to achieve optimum results. Our methodology integrates, as another actor, the ICT into the "Learning Lifecycle". We stimulate students to stop being merely spectators of their own education, and encourage them to take an active part in their training process. To do this, we offer a set of useful tools to determine not only academic failure causes, (for self assessment), but also to remedy these failures (with corrective actions); "discovered the causes it is easier to determine solutions?. We believe this study will be useful for both students and teachers. Students learn from their own experience and improve their learning process, while obtaining all of the "knowledge chain educational links? required in their studies. We stand by the motto "Studying to learn instead of studying to pass". Teachers will also be benefited by detecting where and how to strengthen their teaching proposals. All of this will also result in decreasing dropout rates.

Evaluation of hybrid and distance education learning environments in Spain

This article describes the adaptation and validation of the Distance Education Learning Environments Survey (DELES) for use in investigating the qualities found in distance and hybrid education psycho-social learning environments in Spain. As Europe moves toward post-secondary student mobility, equanimity in access to higher education, and more standardised degree programs across the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) the need for a high quality method for continually assessing the excellence of distance and hybrid learning environments has arisen. This study outlines how the English language DELES was adapted into the new Spanish-Distance Education Learning Environments Survey (S-DELES) for use with a Bachelor of Psychology and Criminology degree program offering both distance and hybrid education classes. We present the relationships between psycho-social learning environment perceptions and those of student affect. We also present the asynchronous aspects of the environment, scale means, and a comparison between the perceptions of distance education students and their hybrid education counterparts that inform the university about the baseline health of the information and communication technologies (ICT) environment within which the study was conducted.

A methodology for evacuation route planning inside buildings using geospatial technology

Evacuation route planning is a fundamental task for building engineering projects. Safety regulations are established so that all occupants are driven on time out of a building to a secure place when faced with an emergency situation. As an example, Spanish building code requires the planning of evacuation routes on large and, usually, public buildings. Engineers often plan these routes on single building projects, repeatedly assigning clusters of rooms to each emergency exit in a trial-and-error process. But problems may arise for a building complex where distribution and use changes make visual analysis cumbersome and sometimes unfeasible. This problem could be solved by using well-known spatial analysis techniques, implemented as a specialized software able to partially emulate engineer reasoning. In this paper we propose and test an easily reproducible methodology that makes use of free and open source software components for solving a case study. We ran a complete test on a building floor at the University of Alicante (Spain). This institution offers a web service (WFS) that allows retrieval of 2D geometries from any building within its campus. We demonstrate how geospatial technologies and computational geometry algorithms can be used for automating the creation and optimization of evacuation routes. In our case study, the engineers’ task is to verify that the load capacity of each emergency exit does not exceed the standards specified by Spain’s current regulations. Using Dijkstra’s algorithm, we obtain the shortest paths from every room to the most appropriate emergency exit. Once these paths are calculated, engineers can run simulations and validate, based on path statistics, different cluster configurations. Techniques and tools applied in this research would be helpful in the design and risk management phases of any complex building project.

TIC em hospitais privados: estudo do uso, do custo e da integração

A tese estuda e analisa as Tecnologias da Informação e Comunicação (TIC) disponíveis em hospitais no Brasil, associados à ANAHP – Associação Nacional de Hospitais Privados que patrocinou a coleta de dados e apoiou a pesquisa com dois temas centrais: uso e custo; integração e interoperabilidade das TIC. A Organização para a Cooperação e Desenvolvimento Econômico (OECD), em estudo sobre TIC em saúde, afirmou que, se implantadas de maneira eficiente, as TIC podem resultar em melhoria da qualidade na prestação de serviços de saúde, aumento da segurança no atendimento ao paciente e custos menores. Para permitir a comparação de resultados e o uso de modelos de pesquisa confiáveis, este estudo adaptou o Modelo de Pesquisa de Uso de TI utilizado pelo GVcia - Centro de Tecnologia da Informação Aplicada da FGV – EAESP e realizou uma complementação dos instrumentos de pesquisa para levantar dados específicos da integração das TIC em hospitais utilizando com referência uma pesquisa aplicada a hospitais norte-americanos. A coleta de dados foi realizada para o período 2009 a 2015 em duas etapas. Na primeira, foi enviado o questionário eletrônico, validado por executivos de hospitais e apresentado no apêndice A. Na segunda etapa, os dados enviados foram validados e aspectos da integração foram esclarecidos por meio de entrevistas. O estudo de custo e uso das TIC resultou no cálculo de diversos indicadores. Gastos e investimentos com TIC em hospitais privados atingiu a 3,5% do faturamento anual dos hospitais da amostra enquanto que o setor da saúde, por sua vez, gastou e investiu 6,4% do faturamento anual com as TIC que implementou. Outro indicador inédito e importante para futuros estudos no setor é o custo anual das TIC por leito hospitalar que permaneceu estável em torno de US$ 39.000 entre 2010 e 2014 e caiu para US$ 36.000 em 2015, valor equivalente a R$ 120.000 de dezembro de 2015. Outras estatísticas e indicadores apresentados no estudo ajudam a entender a evolução e o desempenho das TIC na prestação de serviços de saúde e poderão ser úteis para decidir se as TIC ajudarão a melhorar a segurança e atenção ao paciente, aos profissionais de saúde no acesso a dados do paciente, e a necessária sintonia com o Modelo da Saúde Digital (e-Saúde), a custos adequados. Os resultados do presente estudo são comparáveis aos americanos semelhantes e permitem inferir que o parque tecnológico em uso nos hospitais privados brasileiros poderá alavancar a integração de sistemas existentes, permitindo a sintonia com Modelos de Saúde Digital, com a melhoria de desempenho da cadeia estendida da saúde na atenção ao cidadão que poderá ser assistido onde estiver, a qualquer momento, com segurança. Ação gerencial e investimentos são os tópicos centrais que envolvem a integração.

Development of treatment and control technology for refractory petrochemical wastes /

Mode of access: Internet.

Impact of the freedom of information and privacy acts on law enforcement agencies.

Mode of access: Internet.

Public information and education demonstration project for emergency medical services. Volume I. Final report.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Office of Enforcement and Emergency Services, Washington, D.C.

Public information and education demonstration project for emergency medical services. Volume II. Final report.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Office of Enforcement and Emergency Services, Washington, D.C.